you can make yourself happier

As a little kid growing up in Palermo (Sicily), I used to dream of chasing the Bad Guys who were terrorizing my beautiful city.

In my teens, I started to consider the idea of stopping the Mafia one of those naive dreams that could never become a reality.

But now, for the first time in the last 20 years, there is a concrete possibility to kill the Sicilian Mafia, ending its presence in Italy, in USA, and everywhere else it operates, thus improving the lives of thousands of people around the world. And your help is needed, so listen up. Read more >>

I mean, If you ask my friends about it, first they’ll tell you some of the cool things I’ve done - like composing a hit song and singing it on Top Of The Pops - but eventually they’ll agree that my usual behavior prevents me from gaining any serious cool credo.

The fact is that I don’t feel ashamed easily, and if I feel like it, I might dance like tarantula bitten man, whilst wearing very unlikely items of clothing…

For most of my life, I have considered the idea of coolness superficial & fake: a restriction on my freedom which I could never tolerate.

What was the point of being cool anyway? Everyone wanted to be cool, so I could get more attention by breaking the social norm which defined coolness.

As a teenager, I couldn’t see that the coolness-factor has the power to put the spotlight on a worthy cause: make it cool and everyone will talk about it, make it cool and we’ll all want a piece of the action.

Global warming is a perfect example. For decades the situation has been urgent and getting worse (see graph), but the issue wasn’t getting much attention.
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"Too small!"
"They are way too big."
"The left one is much bigger than the right one, can’t you see?"

And I could never see. What I saw instead was an attractive woman comparing herself to an impossible standard of beauty.

Dove campaign-for-real-beauty get this message across very well: electronically touched-up images of models are presented as genuine, becoming ideals of a “beauty” which simply does not exist.
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"You can initially lose 5 to 10 percent of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back," said Traci Mann, UCLA associate professor of psychology and lead author of a comprehensive study on the subject. "We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more. Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people."

That was one of the first advices I got when I started blogging, and that is why I waited 4 weeks before talking about Will Smith’s film.

This is what I wanted to write initially: “Have you seen the movie In Pursuit of Happyness? If you didn’t don’t bother, I’ll explain it to you. A guy is poor. He gets rich. Money is happiness. The end.”

Why did I feel angry? The reason is simple: I think that the sophisticated way in which the “get rich or die trying” message is delivered might lead us to believe that maybe money IS happiness after all…
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